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Green Real Estate Law JournalDiscussing current issues in construction and real estate law as they relate to sustainability, from the perspective of owners, builders, and design professionals. Published by Stephen Del Percio, B.Eng., J.D., LEED AP.

WWJJD: What Would Jane Jacobs Think Of Green Building In New York City Circa Now?

If you dabble in urbanism even a little bit, you know who Jane Jacobs is. I write this with conviction, because I only dabble in urbanism a little bit, and I know who Jane Jacobs is. But for most of us — or at least for me — the actual outlines of who Jane Jacobs is and what her legacy means are fairly vague. I know her as the opposite number to Robert Moses, which is to say that she’s The Good Guy opposite his mustache-twirling central planning baddie in the battle for the soul of New York City’s built environment. (Incidentally, I’m getting ready to start reading Roberta Brandes Gratz’s Battle For Gotham, which is about that conflict and might deepen that understanding somewhat) It helps, from the perspective of my own biases, that Jacobs’ ideal city looks a lot like mine and includes the very same built-in, human-scale efficiencies that David Owen argues ensure NYC’s unexpected and near-unprecedented greenness. (Peter Dreier of the National Housing Institute provides a neat overview of Jacobs’ beliefs and extraordinary life here) I’m not sure what kind of personal relationship I would’ve had with the relentlessly feisty, contrary and contentious Jacobs — since she passed in 2006, I’ll just assume we would’ve gotten drinks every Tuesday and gone to Mets games together, or something — but I do know what kind of relationship I have with her ideas. It’s a cordial one. A more complicated question, though, would be how Jacobs feels about the state of green building in New York City circa now.

Jacobs wasn’t much for mega-projects, which made itself felt most famously in her (successful) opposition to Robert Moses’ attempts to turn Fifth Avenue into a major arterial and open a highway that would’ve sped drivers through lower Manhattan, but also manifested in her resistance to better-conceived developments such as Lincoln Center. Jacobs was, on the other hand, generally all for community-driven initiatives. While this enables us to divide recent gbNYC stories up into things Jacobs would or would not have liked — she would’ve loathed Brooklyn’s loathsome New Domino development; she presumably would’ve loved Long Island City’s privately conceived, funded and executed quasi-homesteady Brooklyn Grange farm (which just recently had its ribbon-cutting ceremony) — it doesn’t really do us much good in terms of helping us to understand contemporary Manhattan as Jacobs might have. And that understanding becomes doubly difficult when we consider just how much of what’s happening in New York’s green scene is the result of incentives designed by one of Jacobs’ other bugaboos: the state.

Does it matter what Jane Jacobs would think about all this? Whether she’d recognize anything of the city she describes and celebrates and excoriates in The Death and Life of Great American Cities in this New York City? In terms of your commute, or the price of your apartment, or your property taxes, the answer is probably no. In terms of understanding the city in which we live, though, it might. Jacobs’ manichean view of the struggle between Communities and Power may be dated in the sense that the conflict doesn’t take the shape that it once did — they don’t necessarily get to write the laws, but it’s not tough to argue that NYC’s mega-developers currently wield nearly as much power than city government, and occasionally wield said power through the city government — but the conflict between big and small interests and big and small development are enduring, and endure still. As long as the city charter retains New York’s byzantine building bureaucracy and vests so much power in the community boards, too, the dynamic tension between the developers and (for lack of a better term) the developed will remain much the same — just as dynamic, just as tense. It’s telling that, all these years later, Jacobs’ ideas still have the power to elicit snarky, peevish editorials from real estate developers in the Wall Street Journal. And it’s telling, too, that the organic, community-driven urbanism that Jacobs so prized in 1961 is still so close to the sustainable NYC ideal nearly 50 years later. Whether a given project or development is on Jacobs’ side, or whether Jacobs would be on its side, seems less significant than the fact that, all these years after The Death and Life of Great American Cities, we are still having essentially the same life-and-death argument about the relative sustainability, livability and viability of New York City.